Mobile professionals, such as physicians, attorneys, sales representatives and the like often find it difficult to communicate with clients, customers, colleagues and assistants. These mobile professionals travel frequently and are not accessible via a desk telephone or traditional, wired computer network. They typically employ human assistants to relay important information, maintain their schedules and filter out all unnecessary interruptions. The personal virtual assistant invention allows the mobile professional to access personal, company, and public information, including contacts, schedules, and databases from any interactive device, such as a telephone.
While the deskbound worker has become even more empowered, the typical mobile worker has a cell phone and a laptop. Easily getting access to corporate data and managing communication with others, especially while in transit, can be extremely challenging. One solution to the needs of a mobile worker was realized in the form of a proxy, or Personal Virtual Assistant (PVA), which was available to the user and could help manage and coordinate communications and data access on behalf of the mobile worker.
For PVA to be successful, it had to be powerful (employ a rich feature-set), intuitive/easy-to-use and efficient. If the PVA was not much more convenient than its alternative (calling someone back at the office and asking them to ‘get John Smith on the line’ or ‘what did John say in his last email’ or ‘put an appointment on my calendar’) then it would not be a commercial success or prove to be a useful tool for the mobile professional.
To a large degree, conventional PVAs allowed a worker, using only their voice and a cell phone, to have the capabilities of email (e.g., Microsoft Outlook) and a multi-function phone (plus some) as they would have had had they been sitting at their desk. These capabilities included email features such as read/annotate/forward/email messages, including attachments and finding messages based on sender, status (read, unread), type (email, voice mail, meeting request), priority etc. PVA also allowed a user to listen to/forward/return voice mail messages and to accept meeting requests, list meetings, book meetings and the like. PVA also allowed a user to manage tasks and to call personal and corporate contacts.
PVA also allowed a remote worker to utilize phone features. These features include placing outbound calls—initiate calls in response to a voicemail (e.g. ‘return this call’), using a personal or corporate contact or just by saying and keying in a number. A user was also permitted to receive calls with call screening—if the user was in a PVA Session then the user would be alerted of the inbound call and be allowed to talk to that caller (separately or as part of a conference call) or send them to voice mail. The remote user was also able to initiate conference calls and still be able to control each leg of conference. Additional capabilities were also provided.